“Being a gracious neighbor becomes a little harder those weeks.”
At a past house I owned in a suburban setting, I had two Silver Maples that produced enough leaves to cover the lawn to knee-high every year. That was a PITA and something I dreaded. Dad would help me once a while, just for something for him to do, and I had bought the house from him in the first place, so he was well aware of the PITA-factor involved!
He rigged up a winch on the back of his truck, we’d lay down a tarp that was tied at the corners to the winch, then we’d rake the leaves onto the tarp, and he would dump them in the back of the truck and cart them off to the dump.
Pretty nifty, and made quick work of things. However, it was a waste of some perfectly good leaves, though I had nowhere to use them all.
My neighbor was the persnickety one, so I spent a lot of time raking MY leaves from HIS lawn, too. ;)
We use the tarp method and drag the tarp over to the hill on the backside of our yard. Amazingly those humongous leaf piles turn into almost nothing after a year. Your suggestions about how to use the leaves has me thinking to put a leaf mulcher on my Christmas wish list.
I’d be looking at those leaf-collecting vacuums by the second round.